Tracey Wigginton

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! The place: Queensland, Australia; a state just recovering from decades of rule by "hillbilly dictator" Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a petty authoritarian with a reputation for brutal homophobia and the even more brutal repression of street protest. The time: the late Eighties, at the height of the AIDS epidemic and public fear about queers and blood. The woman: Tracey Wigginton, a deeply disturbed woman from an abusive background who committed a horrifying crime. The media saw a potential scandal, and created one: it was easier to believe lesbians are vampires than to believe in the endemic nature of family abuse and violence in our society. ----more---- SOURCES: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265940376_Biting_the_hand_that_breeds_the_trials_of_Tracey_Wigginton https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/paroled-lesbian-vampire-killer-tracey-wigginton-will-get-away-with-lies/news-story/d7f1890bf3cb800c110a63d9afae6573 https://www.9news.com.au/national/queensland-news-vampire-killer-tracey-wigginton-facebook-posts/09282693-2a38-4a28-b774-e4e13ce75528 Wiggington, Tracey. "A perspective on long term imprisonment." Hecate, vol. 28, no. 1, May 2002, pp. 163+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A90137673/LitRC?u=fub&sid=summon&xid=a75e4729. Accessed 6 Aug. 2025. https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/paroled-lesbian-vampire-killer-tracey-wigginton-will-get-away-with-lies/news-story/d7f1890bf3cb800c110a63d9afae6573 https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/lesbian-vampire-killer-who-drank-victims-blood/news-story/09102844937bc5d7f8ae57a6ecaa7d23 https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/crime-and-justice/the-dark-secrets-of-queenslands-lesbian-vampire-killer/news-story/f06485d6f4bedf7aff10c6d0cc0493de https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_266021/UQ266021_OA.pdf?Expires=1754556877&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJKNBJ4MJBJNC6NLQ&Signature=RiTUjU3wloJ5ID8FOocSjpBlGCjqSx3tWOlsGk-yjs6t97RfzrIL12lmEqpNzte66K4qvtNWannQlBkdGFt3fpxYMX6BfAPVooV0jWn9XIbe8mtv7dlNoMlY8qlGP12i3ys2cjGijliWW~FlUbT49K78sSDqF2s07VLL2B-joR7iV5IM2SDPzz~mPK9P1GtWClFsA32y3nD7zDGD01owIidTuQEq5iG4eVdJBsdd0Ttam40sGbLnpxE5KH1chiHdDLUn9L7ysMnsfUuU-iFb7LFOuRRFVIRGEP0xfMR7WMKLw-WAJuzldNop789xaNYyIfoohViG7F2D3LeMxrzdZg__ https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/shock-revelation-in-brisbanes-infamous-lesbian-vampire-killing/news-story/ac7ebac0af6c24f5a97d73d200078a38 https://www.news.com.au/national/crime/new-book-reveals-six-personalities-of-vampire-lesbian-killer/news-story/d41b346be98738676f41b52717a3f721 https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/crime-week-dark-secrets-of-australias-lesbian-vampire-murderer/news-story/83ed596770511fa459c4a7feab36ce1c https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/lesbian-vampire-killer-who-drank-victims-blood/news-story/09102844937bc5d7f8ae57a6ecaa7d23 Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to season 9, episode 6 of Badgays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:22.6	My name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author. I'm Ben Miller, a writer and historian currently at work
0:27.4	on a new biography of the fashion designer Rudy Gernick. So last week we looked at the photographer
0:34.3	and FBI informant Angela Kalamaris. Who are we talking about this week, Ben?
0:39.1	Before we get to the subject, we're going to do a fair bit of scene setting here.
0:43.8	So it's 1991.
0:46.1	The Gulf War is raging.
0:48.9	The news is full of breathless discussions of the West's new conflict, right?
0:52.9	It's the end of the Cold War.
0:54.9	It's time for some new enemies. And one clear set has been brewing for a while, the Muslim world, supposedly primitive
1:00.3	and backwards, supposedly hating us for our freedoms. The last enemy of the West, the former Soviet
1:06.7	Union is rapidly descending into chaos and experiencing the largest fallen living standards
1:11.3	without a war in the history of the world.
1:14.0	The news from there comes seldom.
1:15.8	We're the good guys.
1:17.2	Now, we in this set are in Queensland in Australia.
1:22.3	Now, this is the Queensland of the 1994 classic Muriel's Wedding.
1:26.3	Yes.
1:26.8	A corrupt patriarchal, shallow right-wing place.
1:30.0	You're terrible, Muriel?
1:31.7	From 1968 to 1987, Queensland was governed by one man,
1:37.2	a man named Joe Belke Peterson,
	...

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